Ortiz vs. Berto: Victor has to stay focused if he wants to win

By Boxing News - 12/30/2011 - Comments

Image: Ortiz vs. Berto: Victor has to stay focused if he wants to winBy Allen Fox: Former World Boxing Council (WBC) welterweight champion Victor Ortiz (29-3-2, 22 KO’s) has extraordinary skills on both defense and offense, but he has a bad habit of mentally making bad mistakes at times that cost him big time in some of his fights. Ortiz will be meeting Andre Berto (28-1, 22 KO’s) in a rematch on February 11th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ortiz, 24, defeated Berto the last time they fought back in April 2011.

However, the fight incredibly close for the first six rounds before Berto seemed to run out of energy all of a sudden after getting knocked down for the second time in the fight in the 6th round. Ortiz was able to win on superior stamina and workrate alone in the last half of the fight.

That was Ortiz at his finest in that fight. It looked as if he was following the same type of fighting style that Marcos Maidana used against him in beating him by a 6th round TKO in June 2009. Maidana pressured Ortiz constantly and worked him over in close with huge power shots. Ortiz eventually folded in the 6th after getting dropped from a right hand from Maidana.

Ortiz seemed to come unglued in his recent fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr in losing by a 4th round TKO after Ortiz dropped his hands to try and apologize for headbutting Mayweather. Ortiz said he headbutted Mayweather because he had been hit with a series of elbows from him and the referee ignored him when he tried to tell him about it. However, Ortiz losing his composure was what cost him that fight. Had he stayed under control, he might have had a chance of wearing Mayweather down and possibly stopping him. But Ortiz decided to take things into his own hands by trying to foul Mayweather. It wouldn’t have been bad if Ortiz was just looking to pay Mayweather back, but it was his guilt that hurt him because he kept apologizing to Mayweather after he had lost a point for the head-butting by the referee Joe Cortez.

Ortiz sometimes doesn’t seem to be thinking clearly when he does thing. If you look at his fight with Lamont Peterson last year in December, Ortiz was dominating the fight in the first four rounds, knocking Peterson down twice in the 3rd round. But Ortiz decided to stop slugging with Peterson by the midpoint of the fight and ended up giving up a lot of rounds due to his wasted time trying to box. Why Ortiz would want to veer away from something that was working really well for him is unclear.



Comments are closed.